Developing strong oral language skills in the early years includes building a rich vocabulary of common and uncommon words and the increasing ability to use decontextualised language – to communicate abstract ideas and information that are not directly tied to an immediate situation. Strong oral language skills provide mokopuna with the confidence and ability required for comprehension of texts and wider achievement and enjoyment that will carry through the rest of their lives. Storytelling also supports children’s understanding of wider language features such as syntax (how words combine to create sentences), semantics (how words and phrases are combined to convey meaning) and narrative structures.

Ways to support oral language and storytelling

To support the oral language skills of mokopuna, kaiako can model and have interactive conversations with mokopuna that include:

• abstract ideas (ideas, concepts, and events that are not physically present or directly observable, for example, talking about an image of an animal on a card or poster with an infant or toddler, and talking about past, the future, and imaginary ideas with young children)
• storytelling (for example, recounting situations and events, describing imaginary situations and events, and connecting these elements of storytelling to the lives, experiences, and feelings of mokopuna)
• critical thinking (for example, using strategies like commenting, wondering, open questions that support mokopuna to compare, analyse, make predictions, draw conclusions and seeking further information to refine and gently challenge or expand working theories).

Enjoyable and engaging book reading experiences from an early age can foster positive mokopuna attitudes towards literacy. Regularly reading books with mokopuna and using interactive conservations supports both oral language and vocabulary growth and deepening interest in understanding the language and narrative structures found in stories.

For a deeper dive into oral language and storytelling, Te Kōrerorero – Talking Together is a resource designed to enhance effective teaching practices and strengthen the support for oral language development among children across different language pathways. 

Vocabulary knowledge refers to a child’s growing knowledge of words as well as the meaning of the words. Vocabulary knowledge is more than just knowing the definition of a word. It also requires that a child can use a word appropriately in any given context.

Mokopuna need a rich vocabulary of common and uncommon words through language and literacy experiences to comprehend what is said or read to them, and to help them engage in oral language for a variety of purposes. A rich vocabulary provides a strong foundation for learning how to read in junior primary and reading comprehension throughout the years of compulsory schooling.

Ways to support vocabulary knowledge

Here are some ways to support mokopuna vocabulary knowledge:

• Language used in books is almost always more wide-ranging than what is used in conversations, so books on a range of topics play a key role in growing vocabulary knowledge.
• Trips, excursions, and projects offer good opportunities for learning new vocabulary. With mokopuna, point out and name new things that you see and offer lots of opportunities to learn new words and their meanings. It can take 4-12 times of hearing a new word in context before it is learnt. Explanation of the new words and regular repetition is important. Define any new words that you use with mokopuna, so that they always connect the words with its meaning in context.
• Trips, excursions, and projects also provide practical opportunities to value and use te reo Māori, for example, words like te taiao (nature), ngahere (bush, forest), manu (birds), ngārara (insects), rau (leaves), rākau (sticks), manga (branches), moana (sea, ocean), kota (shells), pāpaka (crabs), ika (fish), roto (lake); pūkeko, and awa (river).
• You can help children to understand that some words that sound the same (homonyms) can have multiple meanings, and need to be understood in the context in which they are used. Examples of homonyms in te reo Māori are kī (‘to say,’ ‘be full’), mea (‘to say,’ ‘thing’), and tau (‘to settle,’ ‘year’). Homonyms in English include see/sea, night/knight, write/right.

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognise and manipulate spoken language. It includes being able to hear rhyme, alliteration (repetition of the same consonant sound in nearby words) and assonance (repetition of the same vowel sounds are repeated in nearby words), hear individual words within sentences, syllables, and eventually, blending, and segmenting onset-rimes (see note) and individual phonemes.

Note: ‘Onset-rimes’ involves breaking down a word into two parts. The ‘onset’ is the first consonant sound or sounds of a word, and the ‘rime’ is the following vowels and consonants. For example, in the Māori word ‘pere’ ‘p’ is the onset and ‘ere’ is the rime. Here is an example in English of a series of words with different onsets but the same rime: b-at, c-at, m-at, p-at, r-at.

Phonemic awareness is a more focused skill that is part of phonological awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. This includes blending sounds to form words and segmenting words into individual sounds. It is used by readers to predict sounds when reading and writers to predict letters when spelling. Research shows that a child’s level of phonemic awareness before school provides a strong foundation for later success with reading (Hill, 2021, p. 135).

Ways to support phonological awareness

Here are some strategies for supporting phonological awareness.

• Phonological awareness grows when mokopuna hear the sounds in words. The more they are exposed to spoken language, the stronger their phonological knowledge.
• Phonological awareness requires mokopuna to have good hearing. If a child is not able to detect sounds in words, this may be evidence of a disability, developmental or learning delay or communication difficulty. While we often think of playing with the sounds of language using external speech, we can also do this using internal speech. Everyone uses internal speech, but it is particularly important for children who use Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC). Kaiako can support this by talking with mokopuna about internal speech (for example, “Did you know that when I say the word ‘ball,’ I can also say it quietly in my head?”)
• There is an interdependent relationship between phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Mokopuna with larger vocabularies tend to have better phonological awareness skills. This is because they need to learn to identify differences between words that sound similar.
• Read books with strong rhyming patterns. For example:
  • Dr Seuss’ Fox in Sox and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
  • Dawn McMillan’s bilingual English-Te Reo Māori There’s a Tui in Our Teapot: He Tūi ke rō Tīpāta.
• Sing nursery rhymes or play rhyming games, where mokopuna make up their own rhymes.
• Waiata, storytelling, karakia, rhymes, games such as ‘I hear with my little ear’ – where mokopuna guess the word that starts with the sound rather than the letter name.
• Clapping out words and pointing out features like rhyme and alliteration helps to grow phonological awareness.
• Play beat games with mokopuna where you clap or stomp out the syllables in a word, such as “el-e-phant” or ‘’ar-e-wha-na” so children can hear the different sounds in the word.
• Play rhyming games or make up silly words with mokopuna, for example, by changing the first sounds in words.

Print awareness involves understanding:

• print carries a message or meaning
• concepts about print
• print has conventions

Understanding that print carries a message is supported by lots of experiences with texts and book reading, including repeat reading of favourite books. This helps mokopuna understand that the story in books remains the same, each time it is read, and that the reader isn't just making things up as they go. Pointing out key words in a text or book and talking about them with mokopuna (for example, “This word says 'happy'.” “Look you can see her smiling?”) helps them make links between what is said and what is written or illustrated.

Concepts about print involve awareness, for example, that marks on the page are words that are made up of letters, and that print is read from left to right and top to bottom in English and te reo Māori. Print conventions include such things as a book or magazine is read from front to back in English and te reo Māori, that words and pictures represent the story in a storybook, and that books have a front and back, and turning pages brings the next part of the story.

Ways to support print awareness

As you read with or to mokopuna, you can support awareness of print concepts by talking about how books work. This includes discussing the front cover, the author and illustrator, the direction of print on a page, and what the pictures say about what is happening in the story.

Print referencing approaches to story reading are also effective. You can follow the text with your finger, point out print features (like a word such as ‘Splash’ being written in larger font on a page), identify words that mokopuna may be interested in or recognise in print, and draw attention to punctuation such as macrons in te reo Māori, question marks or exclamation marks.

It is important kaiako are attentive to the print conventions of each language. For example, if you are writing a child’s name on their artwork you can comment on what you are doing and why – that writing starts in te reo Māori and English at the top of the page and goes left to right.

If you are reading a book in Gagana Samoa, glottal stops in words (represented by a ’ symbol) often distinguish between words with the same letters. Glottal stops create a pause between two vowels or a sharper sound when used at the start of a word. For example, in Gagana Samoa the glottal stop in fa’i (banana) distinguishes it from fai (to do). Glottal stops and macrons are a feature of print and writing in many Pacific languages.

Kaiako who model the relationship between oral language and print conventions in a language, provide mokopuna with a foundational awareness of the connection between their spoken and written language that will help them later with reading. Mokopuna may notice and be interested in these features of a book, or they may see posters and functional print that feature the orthographic (spelling) of te reo Māori, Pacific languages, and their home language(s). Natural conversations about these conventions supports mokopuna awareness that each language ‘works differently’ in both oral and written communication.

Alphabet awareness is the developing knowledge of the letters of the alphabet (26 in English, 15 in te reo Māori) coupled with the understanding that the alphabet represents the sounds of spoken language (phonemes) and the correspondence of spoken sounds to written letters. Alphabet awareness is also called the ‘alphabet principle.’

Kaiako who are interested in more detailed information about the alphabet and phonemes in English and Māori can find more information in the following table.

Table 2 English and Māori alphabet and phonemes

 Table 2 technical points:

• English has a complex relationship between its phonemes and letters, which can make it challenging to learn. For example, the letter ‘c’ can represent different sounds (/k/ as in ‘cat’ or /s/ as in ‘cent’). The same sound can be represented by different letters or combinations (/k/ sound be ‘k,’ ‘c,’ ‘ch,’ ‘ck’ in English spelling, as in ‘kite,’ ‘cup,’ ‘chorus,’ and ‘kick’).
• Te reo Māori alphabet has a close relationship between phonemes and their corresponding letters.
• Dialect differences between different iwi Māori can mean variations in the pronunciation, meaning, and spelling of certain words. For example, some iwi Māori indicate long vowels in spelling through using double vowels – aa, ee, ii, oo, uu.